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Basically it was feign death plus the ability to contort your body weirdly, hold your breath indefinitely, etc.

Contortion... Hmm... I didn't think of that, but it would make a lot of sense!

I've always considered the 1E and thus LL monk to be more in the Western mold than the Eastern, with friar tuck as the archetype. Do some reading there and you'll find all sorts of good ideas to tweak the class.

kiltedyaksman wrote:I've always considered the 1E and thus LL monk to be more in the Western mold than the Eastern

Mos def! Which leaves plenty of room open for an Eastern warrior monk.

kiltedyaksman wrote:[...]Do some reading there and you'll find all sorts of good ideas to tweak the class.

Ya I wondered about this and I think it's a good argument; unfortunately, I'm on the ignorant side of ol'friar - outside of Robin Hood. I was thinking of looking into the texts that Scadgrad suggested (Brother Cadfael mysteries). I meant to PM him about the books/series to see if he could give me the gist of the story as I have never heard of it/them.

The Brother Cadfael mysteries are set in dark ages England/Wales. Here's the first installment.

Essentially, Brother Cadfael is a retired crusader with a wealth of worldly knowledge and he solves murder mysteries in and around the abbey. It's in the same vein as The Name of the Rose though I've not read that book, having only seen the film. The Brother Cadfael series is about 20 books long or so, most of them very brief and you'll rip through them pretty quickly. Good stuff if you like the setting.

Monks have always been a favorite of mine, but I never really saw them as fighters, other than hit and run specialists. Back in the day, a couple of friends of mine ran 2 different groups of adventurers. The idea was to be all-in-one sorts of teams. The Elf group was fun and had the benefit of many spells, but our group of 3 monks was just a load of fun. I daresay that if you could get them past 2nd level or so and had plenty of "cleric in a bottle" (as we did), that sort of group would be very fun to play.

Just wanted to add this. Anyone who is curious can go check Dave A's original monks rules from back in 75. Turns out that the AEC version is damn near spot on.

The monk is... weird. I mean, the class is something of a mix between a western aesthetic, an eastern warrior, and an agent of some description; however, when you stop to consider the role the class filled in the original settings, everything seems to fit rather nicely. Enter The Scarlet Brotherhood. Now, this organization was, essentially, a group of racial supremacists that sought to show the whole world just how awesome they imagined they were. The group's highest tiers were comprised of disciplined warrior aesthetics and philosophers; skilled in the martial arts (though not exactly of a wholly eastern bent) and specialized in carrying out subtle missions of sabotage, subterfuge, infiltration and assassination - they were capable of killing as easily with their words as with their hands. They were the absolute masters of finding out things that you definitely did not want becoming public knowledge. As a result, whole nations feared the possibility, the very idea of being infiltrated by that organization. These guys were nuts, but they were also extremely badass. These fellas weren't just kung fu pandas, nor were they just scribes and scholars shut up in some old monastery, waiting 'til the good sheriff came a knocking hoping to get a helping hand in solving the latest difficulty that had befallen gentle Shrewsbury. Nope, they were a whole different breed of bear-detective.